You may have heard of Gordon Moore, if only for his "law": he was the one who looked at how large-scale integration of circuits onto chips was progressing in the 1960s, and drew a line suggesting that you'd get twice as many transistors onto the same area every 18 to 24 months. That usually translates into a doubling of processing power for the same price.

You'll be glad to know that although Moore's law is looking a bit troubled when it comes to desktop computers - heat dissipation turns out to be a challenge, which is why chip makers are turning to multi-core systems - it still holds true in smaller chips. Such as those used for smartphones. Such as the iPhone.

Which means - given that the first iPhone went on sale two years ago this month - that Moore's law is still in operation.

The graph shows what you therefore should be able to expect. Thanks to Craig Hockenberry, a third-party developer, who developed a system for investigating the CPU and bus speed of iPhones and iPod Touches, we can say that the first iPhone (June 2007) ran at 400MHz, with a bus speed of 100MHz. Then there was a software update in January 2008 that saw it rise to 412MHz, and 103MHz. The memory remains at 117MB (reckoned to be 128MB of onboard memory, of which 11MB is used for video.)

You might ask: how does that work? How can a software update make a chip run faster? Simple: the chips on the iPhone are underclocked - running at well below their top speed so that they use less power (and also generate less heat). The Wikipedia page about the iPhone reckons that it has an underclocked 620MHz ARM processor. Though the number varies quite a bit: some say it's capable of 667 MHZ () or maybe it's 620-700 MHz. (Underclocking, and then providing extra performance through software updates, was quite a common tactic used by IBM back when it had a monopoly on mainframes.)

Underclocking the CPU by in this way gives you at least 15% more battery life (the phone has to do other things, such as run the GSM/3G radio, so the CPU isn't the whole story). If Apple ran the iPhone CPU at full speed, you'd have a very hot phone that would run out in a matter of a few hours.

Move on to July 2008, and you have the iPhone 3G, which added 3G capability, and GPS. But the Hockenberry Query shows that it has the same CPU and bus speed as the original. Howcome? After a year you'd expect it would be about 50% faster, wouldn't you? Yes, you might, but Apple clearly took the decision to ration battery life, especially with GPS and 3G sucking it up too.

But then came the updated iPod Touch, which turns out to have a CPU running at 533MHz, and a bus speed of 133MHz. Aha - now we're getting somewhere. The iPod Touch doesn't have GPS or 3G: so it shows you what Apple would be capable of if it weren't husbanding resources. (There is a rumour that the iPod Touch v2 CPU is actually capable of 800MHz - which would again fit with Moore's law, since that's only a 33% increase on the maximum clock speed compared to a year previously; you'd expect about 50%.)

From that we can make a pretty straightforward, Moore's law projection about what next week's iPhone will contain - and thus, be able to do.

Simply, it's this: a processor running at around 650MHz, and a bus speed of about 180MHz. And, as the top (yellow) line on the graph suggests, the CPU will be capable of about 950MHz, but will be underclocked at the same ratio - two-thirds of its top speed - meaning that battery life should be as good, if not better, than earlier versions, because the radio and GPS chips will have shrunk in the past year and so draw less power.

That will mean much faster processing: browser pages will draw more quickly. Email will display more quickly. Video will be smoother.

The next iPhone will be able to capture video: there will be enough processor power there. (Other mobile phones have had video capabilities for ages, but Apple appears to have wanted to have something special to sell, and wanted to preserve battery life.) Expect an improved camera - 3 megapixels, up from the present 2MP, is a reasonable upgrade.

We can also make a number of other forecasts based on those, and other ineluctable realities about the cost of components in computing.

1) Its Flash storage will be doubled. Prices there are halving every year, so rather than the present 8GB and 16GB models, you'll see 16GB and 32GB. A separate data point on this comes from Darren Waters of the BBC, who says he has heard this, independently, from a Carphone Warehouse source. (CPW sells iPhones in the UK.)

2) You'll have a lot more onboard RAM: 256MB in total, rather than 128. Again, simple economics: it costs the same for that much as it did two years ago. That will mean that applications can store more data in memory and boot faster. It might also mean that you'll get better video quality, since there will be more available for the graphics chip.

Based on information from informed sources, I believe the processor in the next-generation iPhone is going to be that kind of upgrade [comparable to the Intel Pentium's speed against its 486 predecessor).

The original EDGE iPhone and iPhone 3G use the same 400 MHz processor. Let's say the rumors are right — and I believe they are — that the next-generation iPhone's CPU will be running at 600 MHz. In the same way that, say, a 90 MHz Pentium was more than 1.5 times as fast as a 60 MHz 486, the 600 MHz CPU in the next iPhone will be more than 1.5 times as fast as the current 400 MHz iPhone CPU.

He then makes the interesting point that

Much of what the iPhone does now is constrained by its CPU. App launching speed, for one thing — faster app launching should make it feel more like switching between apps and less like quitting/relaunching them. Web page rendering is also significantly constrained by the CPU. When I first used NetShare I was amazed at how fast Safari on my MacBook Pro could render web pages using the iPhone's cell network connection. Web page rendering on current iPhones is hindered at least as much, if not more, by the CPU than by the speed of the 3G network.

Two last questions remain.

First, will it be able to run Flash, so that you can look at all those pages and hunt around for the "Skip Intro" button (or, alternatively, be able to browse YouTube and Vimeo without hitting blank spots)? Last June iPhone Atlas looked at Flash performance on mobile processors. The problem is that Flash is really processor-intensive: great for grown-up CPUs, not so good for portable devices with small batteries which like the CPU to sip, not slurp, power. And despite some brave-faced talk from Adobe last summer about "getting Flash on the iPhone", it's not happening in a hurry: Apple doesn't really need Flash, because the BBC and YouTube have made MP4 versions of their videos that work just fine on the iPhone/iPod Touch. In fact, Adobe needs Apple rather more than Apple needs Adobe at the moment. Conclusion: no Flash.

Secondly, what will the price be? There has been speculation about a cheaper "iPhone mini" - some of the more credulous wrote excited stories suggesting it would be released or at least announced in January. After all, Apple did start splitting the iPod into multiple products, introducing the iPod mini in January 2004.

But I don't think it will. The iPod mini was a move to take control of a market where Apple had already led for a year; it was expanding the market. The iPhone, for all its merits, isn't leading the market, and isn't pulling away from the market. Apple will prefer to stick with the single product for now.

Oh, and the price? The same, I'm afraid.

The quick 5-second roundup:-significantly faster-will record video-better camera-no FM. (Uses battery, so let accessories companies fight for it)-twice the storage of current models-still no Flash-will work as a modem (it's always been able to, but networks refused to allow it)-same price.

So - does that sound like enough, or is it still eminently resistible for you? Is a smartphone on your buying agenda, and if so, which one?